Officials give up after voters turn down bond for sewer system

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — After a bond to pay for a town sewer system failed last week, Greers Ferry Mayor Shelly Davis and aldermen from the committee that worked on the project have called it a dead issue.

The sewer would have been paid for by a bond issue and federal grants, but the bond issue failed by 76 percent, with 346 votes against and 109 for, and subsequently, the grant application was canceled.

The sewer was a contentious issue, and in the weeks leading up to the election, letters to the editor in a local newspaper floated accusations of everything from environmental damage to favoritism and secrecy. In an article on Friday, Davis assured voters she had gotten the message.

“I have upset a lot of people in the community by pursuing this project,and that was never my intent,” Davis told the paper. “I truly felt that I was acting in Greers Ferry’s best interest by pursuing this project. It was never intended to burden the citizens or cause hardship on anyone. With that said, the citizens have spoken, the council and I have listened, and the project is now a dead issue.”

David Blasingim was chairman of the sewer commission. He said the bond would have paid about $3 million of the estimated $10 million sewer project. The federal grant would have contributed another $3 million and the remainder of the project would have been paid for with a loan. He said the council decided to let the people decide if they wanted the system and never expected so much negative feedback. There has been no talk of pursuing the issue, either with a different sewer system or different payment plan.

“It’s pretty much just not going to happen now,” Blasingim said. “The city can’t take debt on, and it’s difficult to put that kind of burden on the people’s billing for the sewer system. For the time being, or really any time in the near future, it is dead.”

Steve Jones is another alderman who worked to help promote the bond. He fears that if the city waits on the sewer system, they won’t be able to get as much grant money.

“But it didn’t pass and I guess you just have to move on,” Jones said. “They’ve tried to bring upsewers in the past, about 10 years ago. This year it went a little ways, but folks didn’t want to pay for it. ... Time will tell, it may be 20 years from now the same issue comes up again.”

Blasingim and Jones are a little baffled at the outcry, because they fear that having so many septic tanks near the lake is a potential pollution risk. They also reason that the town, which has about 965 people, according to the Census Bureau Web site, will grow, and someday a sewer system will be more critical.

“My opinion is that at some point they’re going to have to do something,” Blasingim said. “Our population is growing and basically growing all along the lake. We don’t know at what level, and we haven’t done any test to determine what’s going on (pollutionwise), but I would say that at some point, it is going to become an issue.”

Floyd Bradley, who owns a weekend home in Greers Ferry but lives in Conway, sees a lot of things wrong with the city’s proposal. He thinks the city should conduct tests to see if pollution is even an issue and that area businesses (who he sees as the real beneficiaries from the proposed sewer system) should band together and pay for their own system if they want it.

But most of all Bradley is glad the project died because he said it would have been a fiscal disaster.

“I am against it for economic reasons,” Bradley said. “I have experience, because for the past year and a half I’ve been on the Faulkner County Public Facilities Board. We were building a community sewer around Lake Conway, not identical, but similar to the one they were trying to do. We had some real problems with that one, financially.

“Our revenues were not what we thought we were going to have, and consequently, we haven’t had the money to pay our bills, and I could see something similar happening in Greers Ferry. It think that the mayor has the best interests of the city at heart ... but since it’s voluntary, there’s no way that it could ever be financially feasible. The way the national economy is going and the way the federal government is spending us into debt, there’s no way. This little town can’t afford it.” - awidner@ arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 50, 53 on 11/13/2008